For years, people have attempted to handicap, or forecast, horse racing results. If the handicapping accurately predicts the outcome of the race, a wager in accordance with the outcome can yield thousands if not millions of dollars to a handicapper. In the existing art, forecasting a race is a laborious two step process. First, the handicapper manually collects data for the upcoming race and past races. This involves reading tens to hundreds of rows of data published in the Daily Racing Forum, a printed publication. Overall, the amount of data used to handicap a race is considerably large and covers information other than just the horse's call time. This information can include the track location, surface, condition, and distance for the handicapped track and numerous previous races. Next, the handicapper must weigh various qualitative factors and manually calculate quantitative factors. Due to the volume of data to be considered, manual consideration of the data is time-consuming, arbitrary, and often unreliable. In fact, for some races, manually handicapping a race can take up to one hour for a skilled handicapper. Considering the brief periods between races, possibly changing weather and track conditions, and a rapidly changing betting line, manually handicapping a race is suboptimal. Moreover, the complexity of manually handicapping a race often discourages beginners from becoming avid horse racing fans.
One response to the problems associated with manual handicapping has been to provide a fee-based service that picks the winners in an upcoming race. Typically, these services are communicated to a customer by way of publication, written or electronic. By selecting the winner for you, these services allow their customers to circumvent the handicapping process. A significant shortcoming of these services is that the customer is unable to change the assumptions used to make the picks. Thus, the customer is completely reliant on the ability of the service provider to be a skilled handicapper.
Another response to the problems associated with manually handicapping a race has been to electronically communicate information on the current race and past races to a customer's personal computer. However, this service does little to reduce the amount of time it takes to handicap a race. After receiving the electronic data, the customer is still faced with the problem of selecting and weighing the relevant data. Thus, this too is a time-consuming and laborious process.